Friday, October 16, 2009

This Is Just Too Beautiful

You may have seen this photo already. The cloth is woven from spider silk from Madagascar golden orb spiders, collected by 70 people from a million spiders over four years. That comes out to about 10 spiders per day per person.

It's quite a feat, and I would love to be able to touch this fabric. Spider silk is stronger than Kevlar, so it would also be interesting to check out its strength.

Wired has the longest story (from which I took the photo), and the New York Times has more, with a photo of the entire textile. It sounds like they took pretty good care of the spiders.